Monday, December 21, 2009

Unless you consider poetry to be music....Because I've got some new poems up on TTBWY, my award-winning blog of verse. Which award, you ask? An imaginary one, bestowed by a cabal of clever men and women who meet quarterly in a former VFW Hall-turned-microbrew-pub in a secret Canadian city. They pore over thousands of internet poems (so you don't have to) and determine a winner on the basis of nothing less than sheer merit. They send the winner (me) a statue of a penguin locking arms (flaps?) with a statue of a penguin. They also send the winner a fancy pen (odd for a web-based poetry award), a membership card (for the clever cabal), and a get-out-of-analogy free card which I will use NOW.The poems? The one with the years in parentheses in the title was written entirely in a bathroom. I had my laptop with me. I was not there for the typical reason. (Let's just say that until my internet service is turned on in my new place tomorrow, I have to creatively position myself in certain parts of the apartment to "borrow" a signal.) What's it about? A picnic table in 1987 and a picnic in 1997.The one about the shoelace is seemingly about optimism but read carefully. Never has optimism been so conditional. Still, it's a ray of sunshine compared to some of my spring/early summer stuff.

If you go all the way back to the one I posted on 12/12, then you're a friend of mine. I take a real-life tale of allowing my mother to buy me a couch for Christmas as an excuse to complain about how far I had to drive to have someone buy me a couch... to complain about the heat... god what an ungrateful one I am.First things last - the one called Never Been to Hammond is a personal favorite. Unlike other poems (see Honor in a Misnomer, Tenleytown, everything I wrote between 1997 and 2006), I can pretty much explain what every word in every line means. I can explain the art of the line lengths, the math of the fours and the eights and the (hidden) threes. I cover just about every significant moment of my life and a whole bunch of trivial ones but most importantly, I get to write "Never been in a believer's church" (been saving that for a while) and I get to remind myself about Oxnard, beautiful Oxnard.

Where are we on the parentheses count? Nine left ones and nine right ones. It seems like a lot more, doesn't it?